MyDoom lurks on

Net experts are warning that the threat from MyDoom is not going to go away on its own.

"The only way to stop this extremely dangerous worm is to remove it from your PCs," warned Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds in a company circular.

And Jack Clarke of McAfee agrees. He said: "It's not going away on its own. We still have viruses from the 80s in circulation".

It is widely believed that MyDoom is designed to self-terminate on 12 February, but Reynolds said, "MyDoom has created an army of zombies; remote PCs that can be used to execute attackers' future commands".

"These attacks will [probably] continue after 12 February, and the threat will not end until the MyDoom executable has been removed from all infected PCs."

The day after 12 February will be Friday the 13th, always a popular time for virus release.

In terms of MyDoom, most of the hard work is over for McAfee, but Clarke says, "we can [only] wait for the next one. It will possibly be within days".

Clarke pointed out that 26 per cent of McAfee's 170,000 home users had been infected, and added that facilities to remove the worm were readily available on the net.